My kids love to dance and sing, what better, then, to get a game which lets them do both?

Super Start
Boogie Superstars is the sequel to Boogie, but despite the same team on board designing the game it looks completely different.  Gone is the bizarre freestyle dancing and instead we have a more traditional style dance game, albeit with Wii controllers instead of a dance mat.

But the first task will be to design your dancer.  No strange aliens here, just teen pop style characters.  You have some control over things like hair colour and skin etc but it’s no proper character creation mode as with other games like Tiger Woods.  Still, young girls (let’s face it, this game is aimed directly at that market) will love the simple character choices.

Super Karaoke
You get to choose whether to sing or dance next, in several genre categories.  Not every song has the choice of both singing and dancing though so you’ll get a limited choice at first until you unlock more songs.

Any USB microphone should work with the game, including Rockband and Guitar Hero ones and the bundled mic that comes with the bundled version of the game will actually work for Rockband and Guitar Hero too, saving some money if you have one title and want to get one of the others.

The songs themselves are all by cover artists and it shows.  However, they’re not bad enough to be an annoyance and younger players won’t even notice, they’ll probably be too busy warbling away.

Talking of warbling, the game is pretty forgiving as to what you can get away with singing, though bizarrely it requires words in the right place, even on songs where the words are censored out!  Again, this is fine for younger players and stops them from feeling too frustrated, but it also has enough scope to allow more experienced players to try and reach Superstar status with a bit more effort.

Super Moves
Dancing is a case of following on screen prompts, as with other dancing games.  The moves range from simple moving of one arm left or right to odd moves like ‘pumping’.  It’s quite fun to watch others trying to dance and I’m sure there are probably youtube videos of people trying (or should be!).

Multiplayer is available if you have more than one set of Wii controls and is great fun as long as you remember to move far enough away from each other.  We only found this out after several injuries had already occurred!

As with singing, progressing through the songs will unlock new songs and items for the characters.

Super Market
Unlocking songs and items gives the game further depth, allowing you to customize characters, gain new backgrounds (levels) and new songs.  The main issue here is that you start with so few songs that you’ll be fed up with them by the time you’ve managed to unlock the new ones, it’s fairly slow going.

There are, however, a wide range of song styles which should keep most people happy (unless you’re a goth or acid house fan).

Super Star Summary
Playing Boogie Super Star is like watching those X-Factor auditions.  There are a fair number of really good and really bad points but the bad points often make the show more memorable.  Adults may find that the game grates after a while but kids, especially girls, will love it and should get lots of mileage out of the game.

6/10 (add a point if you’re a girl under 15!)